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Forum Discussion
New named Dropbox structure
I am a user of DropBox Business, on Windows 10.
Last week, I suddenly realized that the shortcuts to some of my Dropbox folders were broken.
A quick look learned me that the structure had changed...
First post... but today, I received my "Important changes to your Dropbox account" e-mail.
We have a ton of client files, organized by client, with access restricted by team groupings. The first thing I did was postpone the 'upgrade' until Oct 14th, to give me time to find a new solution.
Honestly, I am having a hard time (a) understanding the e-mail's contents, as well as the "upcoming business team changes" help document, and (b) I am struggling to see what problem this is solving for me or anyone else.
One thing is for sure: this looks like a great time to move our agency off of Dropbox. I've been considering this for some time for the following reasons:
- The whole 'off-line/on-line' files things has been a real headache, as Dropbox seems to quietly change the setting back to online only, from time-to-time, which makes syncing with a local copy for editing difficult.
- Some of my teammates have had sync issues with M1 macs, resulting in automatically generated conflict copies being created.
- Sharing a folder with people outside of the organization is difficult, unless you purchase a Dropbox for Business seat for the recipient.
- For working files, you really need TWO copies of your files on your hard drive, which means my teammates are all lugging around external drives for Dropbox to hold the complete copies of their client files, as most new laptops don't have a ton of free space.
- Dropbox recently changed the restore feature from 'forever' to 'one year', unless you pay an upgrade fee.
And now, this forced re-organization of content that looks to a ton of work on our side to get back to where we are, today.
I was an early adopter of Dropbox, but I think we are moving our content elsewhere.
We too rely on the local sync as being the primary reason for using Dropbox. If you find a solid alternative, let us know; we are looking, too.
I'm not sure why Dropbox is pushing so hard to move everybody to the cloud, other than resources (pushing files back out to sync to clients). But when they charge hundreds of dollars per year, that's what we're paying for. There are lots of cheaper cloud storage solutions that are as good or better than Dropbox if all you want is cloud storage.
We are in the process of moving everything over to Google Drive. Our Agency is already using Google Workspace, so the cost part was easy.
It took some experimentation to understand all of the security settings, but we make the cut-over on Wednesday the 21st - the day before our business account renews. We are using GoodSync for cloud-to/from-local sync (i.e. working files), which syncs directly to/from Google Drive, on-line only (which Google calls 'streaming') will sync correctly without two local copies. In the end, I am hopeful that our cloud storage will be easier to use and will definitely use less HDD space.
Good luck!
I signed up for a free account with Sync.com and have sync'ed content to three devices very easily. It is an obvious copy of Dropbox -- the original Dropbox before the Great Reorganization -- which is exactly what I want. Initial experiments all are positive, including modifying a file on one device and seeing it sync to others, and moving the entire repo to an external drive, which worked seamlessly (Pause Sync, move repo, Resume Sync: doesn't get any easier than that).
Next step is to test multiple users. So far I am impressed, but there are a lot of subtle things around sync'ing that Dropbox historically did very well, so it will take some time to see if there are bugs in Sync (like getting on and off of airplanes with a laptop, modifying the same file on different devices, etc).
I had written:
We too rely on the local sync as being the primary reason for using Dropbox. If you find a solid alternative, let us know; we are looking, too.
I'm not sure why Dropbox is pushing so hard to move everybody to the cloud, other than resources (pushing files back out to sync to clients). But when they charge hundreds of dollars per year, that's what we're paying for. There are lots of cheaper cloud storage solutions that are as good or better than Dropbox if all you want is cloud storage.
We will see if the forum moderator deletes this comment, but sync.com looks like a very direct competitor, and worth a look. If Dropbox is sufficiently worried about them that they delete this comment, then it significantly increases the likelihood that I will check them out. Or find an independent community discussion forum for this topic; I'm sure there is one somewhere.
marathon wrote:I had written:
We too rely on the local sync as being the primary reason for using Dropbox.
... But when they charge hundreds of dollars per year, that's what we're paying for...
Ha ha... we are paying hundreds of dollars per month for our team members.
I would have kept paying, I guess, but this reorganization change was the final straw for us.
I *still* don't understand Dropbox's motivation for forcing this change on their business customers, but I no longer need care.
I am glad to hear you got the email before the "mandatory Upgrade".
We were not so lucky and are looking elsewhere to store our files since we have to do all our setup again anyways.
I just wanted to make sure I wasn't the only one caught off guard/surprised they were doing this.
Good Luck on your endeavors.
